I am a developer, several years back, a couple friends and I wrote a loyalty app/saas. The site, allowed a restaurant/shop/bar owner setup a couple types of deals ie "Buy X get Y Free" among others. Each restaurant had a QR code, and when someone would purchase something, the customer would scan it and get a "punch". The owners could track everything via the web. Due to all of us having a 9-5, and this being our first project, we failed, because we didn't realize beforehand that you had to hit the streets every day, and we didn't have the capital to quit our jobs when we figured that out. The only way, to really sell a product like this, was cold calling. Adwords, facebook, etc etc, does not work when trying to reach a small business owner/manager. They are too busy working, to go out randomly searching for stuff. Needless to say, we learned a ton about selling. So, I developed Sales Invaders!. A "sales staff as a service". Things are pretty simple right now, as I'd like to figure out if there is a market for this. If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to ask!
I think its a really great idea, my only concern is that the sales staff you hire won't be as dedicated, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable about my product as I am. Sales is a core aspect to a company, and while it may be possible to outsource sales in an existing company after you've established processes, a young start up won't have that yet. Its a job the founders SHOULD be doing because you're still trying to get a feel for the market.
This is a valid concern. Another issue with outsourced sales people is the fact they are out for themselves first. Sales people are coin operated... and you want them this way. However, you must be careful and shape the way they are paid to align with your business goals.
As a start up, you may be better off hiring a direct marketing company where you can align their focus to your ideal customer profile (assuming this grows as your product develops). You pay them to set appointments at the correct title/level (which is 90% of the work in sales) and you use your dedication, enthusiasm and knowledge to get the deal closed.
I agree. If you haven't sat down with your potential customers yet, we probably aren't for you. If you have visited 5-10 places, can list the questions that get asked over and over, and have your pitch down, but just don't have the resources to hire a staff, then we can help. If you aren't sure what your customers want yet (ie haven't cold-called), we do provide the feedback relevant to a startups needs, but that is not the core offering.
This service definitely has merit and I love you guys just putting it up right away rather than building out a full-site.
A lot of founders underestimate the importance of sales people early on. Suster has a couple of good pieces about start-up sales people vs corporate sales people (they are very different skill sets). My biggest concern would be outsourcing the feedback loop that is created by those initial sales calls. The salesperson is your window to customers and your compass to finding product-market fit. It's so critical you often see founders taking on the sales task first-hand. Obviously that doesn't scale and I believe that's where you guys come in!
I would really need to see how you're providing me sales call data and feedback. A screenshot of a dashboard, spreadsheet or something. Allotted phone time with the sales people to discuss what they encountered in the field. Anyway to formalize sales feedback would be of great value. Good luck!
Ah ha! I love when someone "gets it". Which you do. The feedback, is going to be extensive, we are still early in the process, but one thing we considered, is taping the sales interaction, and providing it to the startup, but it may "skew" the comments and feedback from the business owner. It's a problem that we are going to solve, and knock out of the park though.
On a more serious note, I think more information about the service would be nice. My personal interest would be in enterprise sales. Is this within the realm of possibility for you guys?
"ElasticSales is currently booked out for the rest of the year and therefore not able to accept any new clients at the moment."
"Think Amazon AWS for Sales."
Have anyone ever seen a message on the aws.amazon.com website saying "Sorry, AWS had sold all available computing resources and would not be able to buy more servers till the end of the year"?
Don't get me wrong, I like what you did and I like close.io (and I may use it soon), but the page you're now showing on elasticsales.com has the word "Failed" written all over it. Well, at least that's how I see it, I might easily be a minority (and I usually am).
For the industries you pitch question, definitely take off what you currently have and put more difficult industries. Restaurants are ok, but dog groomers? No. I'm looking for someone who can pitch heavy machinery dealers and large international brokers, not a dog groomer or hairstylist.
If your company has extraordinarily complex deals like that, I can't see why you'd even consider outsourcing them to a generic sales service like this. Being able to close those sorts of deals is going to be an essential core competency for your company, and even if Sales Invaders was successful in deals like these, you're essentially throwing away an opportunity to learn how to do these sorts of deals in the future.
It's like demanding that Heroku focus on servicing billion dollar companies - there's really no benefit in using an "easy to get started and scale"-type service in large, complex scenarios.
We have packages starting at $1000, depending on your needs, we can pitch up to 100 customers in your vertical.
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So you are going to visit 100 customers for me, for the price of $1000? This seems to be quite low. From my experience (10 years, outside sales B2B, full commission) a sales person can only visit about 10 locations a day if they are actually talking and not just pitching something for 30 seconds. If you get any traction with the customers, that will drop to 5 per day.
By my numbers you would work for 10 days for $1000 and have the traveling expenses as well. Sounds good for me, and bad for you. I am also curious about performance. How will I know that your sales person did cold calls? How will I know if they are any good, or if your guy is out there damaging my companies reputation?
We currently use manufacturer reps, about 16 of them. It is a continuous challenge to understand the actions that they are actually taking (not what they tell me they are taking) and hard to track direct results because many of our products are sold through multiple tiers of distribution. These reps are old school, with companies that have been in business for 20+ years.
I hope it works, it would be a great service to use. Feet on the street are hard to manage. Good luck.
That copy may be confusing, but we have packages starting at $1000, we have the infrastructure though to visit 100 places (depending on your niche), but that is our top tier; where $1000 is our lowest tier.
Tracking of where/when/how long on site, who they visited etc, is all handled via an app. The customer has literal access to the route driven by a particular rep, how long they were on site etc.
For the outside B2B sales you mentioned, what the compensation structure is like? Purely commission or with a fixed part / retainer? If it's a high-tech software sales, do you have an idea of what's the going commission rate is?
The only experience I have is with salaried sales with tiered commission, so I just want to understand how the alternatives work.
I made between 5% and 15% on the sale. Sales were typically $10,000 - $50,000, and I was selling capital equipment. I sold about 1.2M per year, at an average of 12.5% commission (in the 90's). There was a $600 per week draw against commissions, and health care. All the other expenses I had to cover - fuel, vehicle, etc.
Top sellers liked the program, because they made a lot of money. Lower sellers would complain and want to be put on salary (so they would earn more). I preferred the full commission, but I was always #1 or #2 in sales so I earned on the high side.
It was nice, only worked 4 days a week (Monday morning and Friday afternoon off).
First off, I want to say this is a great concept. All startups either hate sales or need more sales, so it sounds like your business fits for both categories. I have some experience with door-to-door sales teams and cold calling for 2 different startups. The few comments I have are similar to other discussions but still need to be addressed:
1) Sales Team - Who is your sales team? What is their background? When I was on the door-to-door sales team I was working along side a lot of college students that were not motivated. This was a huge let down to the owners who paid for the sales team. Be upfront with your customers on who will be contacting their potential customers. As a startup founder I do not want my name/brand to be tainted in the industry as a company forcing outsourced sales team to pressure my customers into buying my product (this is an extreme case but does happen).
2) Channel - It sounds like you are cold-calling only, if this is the case then do not include "door to door" and "feet on the street" in your title if you are not going to be talking to potential customers in person. My recommendation would to have packages for cold-calling and a separate package for door-to-door sales. This may be beneficial for businesses to have the option and would be a great upsell for SalesInvaders!
3) Customers - It sounds like you are trying to cover most small business as a target customer. My recommendation is to specialize in one industry. This will allow your team to get better at coming up with pitches for the same industry while understanding your target customer. Also, your chances for getting other clients in the industry will increase when you can tell them that you got X amount of sales for another company in that same industry. This is a crucial selling point, as you would know since your in the business of sales.
Local businesses, particularly restaurants, bars and nightclubs, are extremely difficult to sell to these days, particularly in major cities like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, etc.
These folks are pitched on new "apps" all the time and unless you have a really compelling proposition, standing out from the last 10 people who walked in trying to sell a new technology-based service is tough. In fact, one of the first things you're likely to be asked selling to restaurants, bars and nightclubs is the size of your audience. If you don't have a meaningful enough number, drumming up interest is all but impossible for most.
As one of the few full-time sales people that hang out on HN...
Business to business sales (which is the usual code for high volume cold calling jobs) is a slog. It takes a certain kind of person to do it. I've done it, but never really liked it. I'm more of an enterprise sales guy for start ups. Maybe the variety of different pitches every week is a selling point for potential staff? I really don't know. I do now that you couldn't pay me enough to do the job :)
Outsourced cold calling (phone) is a pretty major industry in the enterprise space. It'll be interesting to see if this scales down to a feet on the street model.
We took "Show HN" out of the title because Show HN implies something you've made that users can play with. Things like landing pages, fundraisers, and email signups don't meet this criterion.
In general it is a good idea but there is to little information on the homepage.
Do you also work for provision?
Do you work with more technical saas products such as CAD/CAM?
This is a good idea and I can see why a lot of small business could have a reason to use it. Just wondering, you may come up with lots of "what people want" ideas as part of your discussions (not necessarily connected to your "client"). You could perhaps try to do something out of those ideas to serve as "leads" for others.
I read it as for $1000 they will pitch to 100 potential customers. They say on their site that they provide value if the lifetime value of your customers is over $100, which implies they expect a success rate of at least 1/10.
Cool. You mention restraunts/salons/dog groomers. Any plans to move higher up the chain to SaaS enterprise type sales?
I haven't formalized my process enough to hand off sales to someone else, but I am champing at the bit to try something like this once I get there.
I think there is a sort of "enterprise light" market where this could work. Let the outsourced staff handle most sales, and hand off to the company for the more complex sales.
This model has had some success in the pharma business, but that business is uniquely about just getting to the doctor and passing out info. I'm somewhat skeptical of this idea in any business that requires real, motivated salesmanship.
I think there is a fundamental lack of understanding with how business works unless you have a new angle or technology to accomplish this. Is there a physical business that doesn't have a $100 Lifetime value per customer?
Both. Cold-calling to me, as I am using it on the site, is contacting a business who is not expecting it. Rather than use the phone, or email etc, we are sending someone into the restaurant/bar/dog groomer etc for an in-person interaction, pitching your product/service/app etc.
To add to the feedback of others, this was confusing to me as well. I saw repeated use of "call" and "calling," and understood that to mean using the phone, which was inconsistent with "feet on the ground."
Doesn't matter what you think it means - if it confuses everyone, just change it.
To be fair, it's actually quite correct, as in "to call on someone at their doorstep". That usage is a bit archaic, but the terminology is pretty standard in sales. I'd suggest rather than change it to something nonstandard, just clarify what packages may include with a bit more copy.
Door-to-door-salesmen-as-a-service sounds a whole lot more impactful that cold calls over the phone. which could theoretically even be off-shored as well as outsourced.
I have ideas for products for small businesses and I'm looking for ways to test the waters. Is that something your service would be useful for? Or do you think I already need something built?
By the way, I'm feeling like using your service would be "cheating" since I'm terrified of making cold calls or showing up places myself :-(
